PHYSICIAN ADVOCACY
Governmental Affairs

Welcome
to MSSNY membership from the Division of Governmental Affairs. Every year our
division analyzes thousands of bills introduced in the New York State
Legislature that impact upon the ability of physicians to provide necessary
care to their patients.

MSSNY
issues memoranda of support or opposition to the Legislature where appropriate
on hundreds of these bills, and our lobbyists work with members of the
Assembly, Senate and Governor’s office to advocate for passage of legislation
which the Society supports. We also work to assure that legislation opposed by
MSSNY is not enacted or that it is amended to remove objectionable provisions.

Tips on making the most of your political clout through tools your
membership provides:

. Legislators need to hear directly from physician constituents (in addition to MSSNY lobbyists) if they are to believe that an issue is of serious concern.

. Use
the Grassroots Action Center on the MSSNY Website to
contact your representatives in next to no time at all, with messages
we’ve prepared or your own edited versions. All you need to know is your
zip code to launch a letter or an email to the Governor, legislative
leaders and your local representatives.

Let us know about issues you feel we should be addressing. E-mail Moe Auster, Esq., at mauster@mssny.org.
We’ll carry your message to the legislators.

In the last few legislative sessions, we have faced an onslaught
of proposals which would have adversely impacted the practice of medicine, and
we achieved real and substantial victories:

We
worked to reduce
administrative hassles by enacting legislation

to eliminate the requirement to report to the State
when circumstances require a prescription to be written instead of being
e-prescribed

We
organized physician
advocacy to push back against proposals that would
have drastically cut fees for care to Workers' Compensation patients, and
worked to achieve significant increases in payments effective April 1

Working
together with affected specialty societies,

our advocacy resulted in the defeat of proposals that
would have drastically cut payments to physicians participating in the
Medicaid patient-centered medical home program

we defeated virtually every broad scope of practice
expansion bill, including State Budget proposals to permit independent
practice for nurse-anesthetists, and legislation to permit nurse
practitioners to enter into drug management protocols with pharmacists

Our
advocacy resulted in the defeat of proposals

which would have limited injured worker choice of
physician in the Workers Compensation program

that would have greatly expanded the investigatory
power of the State to investigate alleged physician misconduct

that would have greatly increased the power of the
Medicaid Inspector General to penalize physicians for billing errors

which would have authorized big box stores like
Walmart and CVS to directly employ nurse practitioners to deliver care to
the public.

We
defeated several proposals which would have placed untenable conditions on
obtaining state funded excess liability protection, including successfully
opposing proposals to require Medicaid participation and having to obtain
a tax clearance

A short review of some additional
recent important victories MSSNY has won for you:

Passage
of legislation to assure the availability and transparency of
comprehensive out of network coverage for our patients and preservation of
usual and customary, a victory important for all physicians, not just
those who stay out of network, because it preserves some ability for you
to walk away when an insurer is offering an undesirable contract. Without
a viable option to be out of network, all physicians are negatively
impacted.

Re-instated
“prescriber prevails” protections for several categories of prescription
medications in the Medicaid managed care program.

Removed
the requirement for physicians to execute a separate written patient
consent when offering a patient an HIV test.

Defeated
measures that would have imposed direct or indirect taxes on office-based
physician services.

Sincerely,

Moe
Auster, Esq.Senior Vice President Legislative and Regulatory AffairsDivision of Governmental AffairsPS Your User name is your MSSNY Member ID#, 2919993, and your password
is your last name in lower case. If you have trouble logging in, please contact
ssachs@mssny.org.

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